News Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger retires, effective immediately — also steps down from BOD, two co-CEOs step in

[rluker5]

Should be good for short term profits. Not so good for long term profits or the consumer.

 

[JamesJones44]

Stellantis' CEO also just stepped down, so quite a dramatic recent turn of events going into the end of 2024!

They are in a very similar boat. IDK if they survive either, will be a long road if they somehow make it out.

 

[Thunder64]

Co-CEO's? LoL. There is a reason there aren't co-Captains on a ship.

 

[thestryker]

The writing was on the wall when the stock price tanked after Intel started being transparent about foundry costs. The problems there have long been obvious to anyone with the tiniest clue about silicon manufacturing, but we don't live in a world where money people are competent. Here we are though with him being forced out (whether literally or just his choice to self sacrifice) before even getting a chance to complete his initial plan.

I don't really think he's been a perfect CEO, but given the state of Intel and publicly traded market realities he seemed to be doing as well as can be expected.

The only positive, if it remains intact, is the requirements added to the Chips Act money don't allow Intel to sell off IFS in the near term.

 

[phead128]

<<Deleted post>>

The Fed chip acts doesn't prevent spinning out as a separate private entity, it just says Intel must have 50.1% ownership/voting rights if it is spun out as a separate entity, or 35% shareholder if the spinned out foundry goes IPO. (source) It's a forgone conclusion that IFS will be spinned out as a separate entity to offload the costs from balance sheet, just now it's 49.1% offload as opposed to 100% offload.

 

[usertests]

They didn't give him enough time. I agree with @Marlin1975 , I think he is being made the fall guy. The damage was done by the bean counter CEO.

History will not be as kind to Pat the Engineer as you are. He did more damage to a damaged company.

It's so over.

 

[vanadiel007]

Not a good sign to switch leaders in the midst of a crisis. Looks like AMD has won the CPU market, and in my opinion they deserve it.

 

[phead128]

18A is tape-out in just 6 months, so Pat Gelsinger retiring before tape-out means that 18A is terrible shape, he has been gaslighting the board and public the entire time. "More time to see results", but who set the timelines? 5 nodes in 4 years?

 

[palladin9479]

Co-CEO's? LoL. There is a reason there aren't co-Captains on a ship.

It's temporarily and a common practice. The job of CEO is to much for a single person to do and still do their other important job. So they split the job in half and have two other senior executives do it while also doing their other major job until the board hires a new CEO.

 

[palladin9479]

To people quiping about stock prices, that is the difference between a public and private company.

Public companies can create stock and sell it as a way to generate capital for growth or just to pay bills. This makes stock price incredibly important to their ability to grow and invest. When that stock plummeted it signaled that Intel could no longer use stock offerings to cover revenue shortfalls vs expenses.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Yeah, this is pretty alarming. Intel has been struggling with execution in a variety of ways since 2014. The architectures released in the past three years of Gelsinger being at the helm were mostly done and designed before he even got started. I'm not at all confident in Intel's ability to correct things with some other CEO instead of Pat, at least in the near term. It could be a decade or more to recover, if ever.

I believe Pat Gelsinger suffered from Bob Swan's screw ups, and he's a fall guy for having to clean up Bob Swan's messes and not making Intel look good.

I don't think they should've fired Pat, he still needed more time to clean up Bob's mess IMO.

Pat has the right idea with Intel Foundry and chasing US gov't investments. The former should have happened a decade ago at least.

Bob Swan could've done that, but he chose not to.

That's how TSMC got ahead... that and consistent execution. But it's ironic that just as Intel floundered (refinements of 14nm for years), TSMC managed to do better.

The old story of the "Tortoise & the Hare".

TSMC was the Tortoise, Intel was the Hare.

Intel was leading for a VERY long time, but in a marathon, TSMC got focused by Apple and worked on minor NODE improvements every year and they eventually won the race.

Now that TSMC is using the philosophy instilled by Apple, they are leading by ALOT.

 

[Loadedaxe]

Not a good sign to switch leaders in the midst of a crisis. Looks like AMD has won the CPU market, and in my opinion they deserve it.

Like those 9000 series prices?
Without any competition they will be more expensive next round. AMD has only been relevant for the last 6 years. before that it was all Intel minus a few skus for AMD, remember what AMD use to sell chips for?

 

[Thunder64]

Like those 9000 series prices?
Without any competition they will be more expensive next round. AMD has only been relevant for the last 6 years. before that it was all Intel minus a few skus for AMD, remember what AMD use to sell chips for?

Guess you never heard of this thing called the Athlon. That and its succesors beat the crap out of Intel many years ago.

 

[BigNTall]

Poor Pat. Can we assume that 18A is broken too? I read about his career on Wikipedia - it seemed highly unlikely that he was a fit for the job. If they were looking to hire a technical person - why not at least somebody with PHD?

 

[Thunder64]

Poor Pat. Can we assume that 18A is broken too? I read about his career on Wikipedia - it seemed highly unlikely that he was a fit for the job. If they were looking to hire a technical person - why not at least somebody with PHD?

Dude's an engineer. Doesn't get much better than that.

 

[Loadedaxe]

Guess you never heard of this thing called the Athlon. That and its succesors beat the crap out of Intel many years ago.

I said minus a few skus....

point is without Intel, you will no longer afford AMD cpus.

 

[Thunder64]

I said minus a few skus....

point is without Intel, you will no longer afford AMD cpus.

Competition is good for all of us. But AMD beat the P4 and its dual core derivatives by a mile.

 

[why_wolf]

I'm going to make a prediction. In the next five years Intel is going to withdraw from the consumer market and only make high-end (high margin) server chips with some sort of server services side unit. Basically just follow IBM into obscurity.

Qualcomm will eventually get a good enough ARM chip out to take over the laptop market. It will still suck compared to the Apple M series.

AMD will still make desktop CPUs but will stop selling direct to consumers. Either OEM prebuilts only or directly solder to motherboards.

 

[SomeoneElse23]

Like those 9000 series prices?
Without any competition they will be more expensive next round. AMD has only been relevant for the last 6 years. before that it was all Intel minus a few skus for AMD, remember what AMD use to sell chips for?

Competition is definitively good for all of us. Hopefully AMD recognizes that, and doesn't abuse their position. But, being a "publicly owned company", I wouldn't count on it.

That said, the 9950 came out at $150 less than the 5950?

Plus, technologically speaking, comparing the price of today's CPUs to those of Athlon or earlier years really is comparing apples and oranges. Companies have to make their profit too, as much as we'd like everything to be cheap. (In most cases, you do get what you pay for...)

And there's this nasty thing called inflation.

 

[COLGeek]

As a reminder, focus on tech, not politics. Thank you.

 

[redgarl]

The AI bus is careening down a hill! 😉 Poor sales of 'Copilot PC's' have both MS and Qualcomm wondering what to do next.

AI is at a very early stage, and whilst there are some neat tricks on phones and some of the chatbots, the 'AI' thing is only slowly gathering pace for general consumers. There just isn't that much interest in it.

The Accelerator business is going to grow YoY. You are mistaking AI and AI business ventures with stupid Apps.

 

[Marco_il_bello]

I'm going to make a prediction. In the next five years Intel is going to withdraw from the consumer market and only make high-end (high margin) server chips with some sort of server services side unit. Basically just follow IBM into obscurity.

Qualcomm will eventually get a good enough ARM chip out to take over the laptop market. It will still suck compared to the Apple M series.

AMD will still make desktop CPUs but will stop selling direct to consumers. Either OEM prebuilts only or directly solder to motherboards.

I think the same way as you except for the story that Qualcomm won't beat Apple

 

[redgarl]

Like those 9000 series prices?
Without any competition they will be more expensive next round. AMD has only been relevant for the last 6 years. before that it was all Intel minus a few skus for AMD, remember what AMD use to sell chips for?

Athlon 64, Thunderbird and the whole Zen That is almost 10 years of the last 25.

 

[vanadiel007]

Like those 9000 series prices?
Without any competition they will be more expensive next round. AMD has only been relevant for the last 6 years. before that it was all Intel minus a few skus for AMD, remember what AMD use to sell chips for?

In the past, AMD was the underdog and people were rooting for them. Now that they came ahead, people are rooting for Intel to rise from the ashes.
Can't win either way.

 

[blppt]

I guess we should've seen the writing on the wall when Jim Keller, the guy who saved AMD with Ryzen (along with the rest of his absolutely storied career), starting trashing Intel after his stint at Intel.